I've just started my backlinking research on dentists. What are these links?

[Czubmeister]

When you go to the URL and the link isn't there, what does it mean? Looks like the link may have been around since 2011. Any clues?  What is an old comment on the story or something?

From openexplorer

URL: http://espn.go.com/espn/espys/?ov=bestplay

Title: 2011 ESPYS - July 2011 ESPNHD

Anchor Text: http://www.l a d e n t i s t.c o m    (I don't want a link to them so I spaced it)

Page Authority: 51

Domain Authority 100

Number of Links: 7

Followable = YES

Origin = External

Target URL: http://www.l a d e n t i s t .com/

[Czubmeister]

Thanks for the responses gang. This is certainly a learning process.

[jenmcardle]

I looked at the page you shared. There are only two places for a non-spots related link on the page.

1. There is an advertisement in the right side bar. Back when SEOmoz crawled the page, could there have been an advertisement from your client? The current ad is from DoubleClick so I would expect the link to be nofollow if it appeared, which makes this option unlikely.

2. There is a twitter block on the page and the web links are followed. The most likely way for the link to appear is through a tweet, but I searched twitter and was unable to locate any tweet referencing that URL.

I see no other possibilities.

I also checked with another tool, AHREFS, and it shows the same link and information as OSE.

[Gyi]

Hi Bob,

It different cases it may mean a lot of things. In my experience, more often than not, if it's in OSE and the link/page doesn't it exist, it's because it's been removed since the last time MOZ crawled the page.

Sometimes, it's because of web trash. But MOZ has been getting much better at filtering that stuff.